BBC Scotland Blatantly Lying To Skew Indy Debate

In March this year Newsnet Scotland published an article (external - login to view)which challenged the widely held belief that the BBC's reporting of the independence referendum could be trusted to be fair and balanced.

The article contained six of the worst examples of BBC political reporting in relation to Scotland and indicated a political agenda was at work. Now, five months after its publication and three weeks before the referendum, we publish the second installment. The six additional examples below are not exhaustive, indeed to fully expose the level of political news manipulation that has destroyed the BBC's reputation as fair and impartial, would have required several volumes.

For those for whom these revelations come as a shock, we simply ask that you consider why the BBC has sought to manipulate the news at this crucial time in Scotland's history. Once considered then the question you need to ask is why, and at whose behest?

The Dirty Dozen - The Case Against BBC Scotland: Part 2

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The Dirty Dozen - The case against BBC Scotland: Part 2(external - login to view)

Blackleaf

#2

Re: BBC Scotland Blatantly Lying To Skew Indy Debate

Sep 1st, 2014

Somebody needs to expose the lies and drivel the SNP are spouting. One unpalatable thing about the Scots Nats are their thuggish behaviour to anyone who disagrees with their view that Scotland should be an independent nation.

It seems most Scots think Scotland should not be an independent nation and they have been dubbed the "silent majority" who are too scared to express their views because of what the SNP thugs will do to them.

Salmond has a whole army of thugs that he sends out to intimidate those who wish Scotland to stay in the Union, and it's reported in a newspaper today that he has done nothing to rein in these thugs.

I wouldn't put it past Salmond to send his mob to polling booths on 18th September to intimidate voters into voting for independence.

It's the same even online. The World Wide Web is now occupied by an army of Scottish "cybernats" who post filthy abuse about those who are against Scottish independence. They just bully and intimidate the majority of people who wish Scotland to stay in the Union and it's shameful that it's allowed to go ahead.

Despite all their attempts to skew the vote in their favour - even by giving SIXTEEN and SEVENTEEN year olds the vote in the referendum, with Salmond thinking most of them will be nationalists even though recent polls show otherwise - I still think the Scots Nats will lose on 18th September and then what will they do? After two televised debates between the leader of the Scots Nats Alex Salmond and the leader of the anti-independence Better Together campaign Alistair Darling - with the first a crushing defeat for Salmond - bookies have put the chances of a Unionist victory in the referendum at 84%.

The SNP’s “cybernats” are a modern political scourge – with the zeal of converts

If – and probably when – Yes Scotland loses, where will all that frantic energy go?

The first ‘yes’ campaign volunteer knocked on my door towards the end of last year. She was a member of the Scottish Socialist Party. I glanced at her dog-eared tally sheet — in my old block of 40 flats, only three residents had said they would vote no. In this neglected pocket of Edinburgh there are men who roll up their tracksuit bottoms to show off their prison tags. It is made up of decaying towers and pebble-dashed tenements. The people here are going to vote for change. Who can blame them?

Now that I have moved to a more genteel suburb outside of the city, a further three yes activists have attempted doorstep conversions. I have heard appeals to my head, my heart and my wallet from nationalists who are as dogged as Jehovah’s Witnesses. What motivates them to plunge into a cause that was, until recently, the preserve of a marginalised few?

One factor is consistently overlooked. Like most Jehovah’s Witnesses, my door-knockers tend to be converts. They have a born-again zeal that propels them on to the streets to share their faith. Their appearance demonstrates that a disengaged electorate is ripe for conversion to the nationalist cause.

Alan Bissett, a prominent ‘yes’ campaigner, made a recommendation recently. ‘On the day of the referendum, “yes” folks should be on the streets giving out not leaflets or flyers, but flowers.’ That’s what Moonie proselytisers used to do in airport terminals.

Without these converts, the dream of Scottish independence would be confined to SNP apparatchiks and a small slice of the voting public. Without all their campaigning, the words ‘End London rule’ would languish in faded paint on motorway flyovers.

Most of the converts I have spoken to cite political disengagement as the reason they support independence. They have finally found relief from political boredom. They want change and the referendum offers a quick fix.

Alex Salmond knows that old-timers don’t shout the virtues of their cause through a megaphone. It’s converts who aggressively seek recruits. They give themselves completely to their new obsession. Which is what makes them so valuable — and volatile.

The ‘zeal of the convert’ is a measurable phenomenon. A 2007 Pew survey of all American religious believers found that converts were more ardent than non-converts both in their beliefs and their practice. The early Christians were nervous of converts. St Paul is explicit in his first letter to Timothy: a church elder ‘must not be a recent convert, or he may be puffed up with conceit and fall into the condemnation of the devil’.

Converts to many creeds, political as well as religious, tend to be excitable and angrily dismissive of non-believers. That helps explain why some Scottish nationalists behave so horribly on the internet. We call them ‘cybernats’ with mock affection, but at times their bile can be so bitter that I wonder if we should drop the cute nomenclature. (After Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling’s £1 million donation to the Better Together campaign she suffered the kind of abuse that would make a prison guard blush.)

These new nationalists remind me of Ukip supporters. Nigel Farage is embarrassed by the gushing devotion and crazed invective of ‘cyberkippers’. When asked about them in private, he murmurs that they tend to be — you’ve guessed it — ‘recent converts’.

The new believers are both an asset and a problem for the ‘yes’ camp. The campaign has a disciplined and professional public face, yet it is constantly embarrassed by its loony fringe. Nationalists with hair-trigger tempers make for disastrous headlines. Yet the sheer energy of these converts is undeniably an asset. They will knock on doors until their knuckles are raw. They will spend every spare hour traipsing up worn tenement stairwells in pursuit of a percentage point. They are not discouraged by polls; being true believers, they dismiss them out of hand.

After two televised debates, bookmakers put the chances of a Unionist victory at 84 per cent. But the quasi-religious determination of the ‘yes’ campaigners is the wild card. Scots who never usually vote in elections — like my former neighbours — are going to turn up in numbers that are impossible to determine.

What will become of the new nationalists in the event of a ‘no’ vote? The most committed ‘yes’ campaigners will still be wound up like spring pistons. It is hard to imagine that this energy will quietly dissipate if they don’t get their way in a fortnight’s time.

The SNP‚€™s ‚€œcybernats‚€Ě are a modern political scourge ‚€“ with the zeal of converts ¬Ľ The Spectator(external - login to view)

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Labour MP Jim Murphy, the MP for East Renfrewshire, the Shadow Secretary of State for International Development and a Scot, had to abandon his 'No Thanks' independence referendum tour of Scotland after being intimidated and called disgusting names by the Scots Nats....

I’ve been called a paedophile, a terrorist and a Quisling: Jim Murphy on the ‘Yes’ mob

I have had to suspend my ‘No Thanks’ independence referendum tour of Scotland.

It was back in June that I announced my plan to tour the country. A hundred events. All outdoors in Scotland’s summer. Me, my makeshift stage of two upturned Irn-bru crates, a microphone, one of those small speaker-amps, a one or two-strong road crew, take it to the streets.

‘From Barrhead to Barra’ was my catchline. Barrhead is in my constituency and is synonymous with an industrial Scotland, a half hour’s drive from Glasgow. Barra is another Scotland, twelve hundred largely Gaelic-speaking fishers and crofters at the southern end of the Western Isles archipelago. The tour is old school politics, reconnecting.

Thousands of people have taken part. Most of them have never been to a political meeting in their lives but this is aimed as politics coming to them on their high streets. Some meetings start small but Scottish people have very British attitudes to queues – once they see one they join in. So the crowds grow sometimes to a few hundred standing on street corners. It has been real people from all sides of the debate having passionate discussions. It works best when there is genuine disagreement and heated questioning.

But recently something else has happened. Things have become much more sinister. Groups of Yes voters are being organised to turn up to intimidate the No campaigners and silence undecided voters at these street corner meetings. This isn’t about the odd impossible to control idiot that every political campaign has. This is concerted and coordinated. It has caught the media attention because one man in these crowds threw eggs at me. I don’t care that someone throws eggs at me – that’s just the sometimes messy pantomime of politics.

The tone of the meetings took a turn for the worse after the first TV debate. Alex Salmond had done badly, and there seemed to be some panic amongst many of the local Yes campaigners.

I had a few great sessions after that, but when I got to Motherwell, there they were.

Shouting. Howling. Screaming. Covered in saltires, the St Andrew’s flag – our flag. You don’t have to take my word for it. They’re all there on YouTube. And our Better Together website, for all the digital world to see.

Since then it has got worse. In town after town it’s no longer undecided voters going about their shopping that I’m meeting but instead there are Yes crowds occupying the street corners I’m due to speak at. The language of treason is a favourite with them. They’re big on Quisling, although I doubt if they know much Norwegian history. Regularly I get called a terrorist and often a paedophile too.

Ugly. But is it spontaneous ugliness? No, it’s not. The organisational tools are the various Yes sites on Facebook, affiliated to the official Yes Scotland campaign. It’s coordinated, determined and increasingly aggressive. I don’t know how high up it goes in the Yes campaign but I do know how widespread it is.

If people out there think this is some ‘normal cut-and-thrust’ of politics, then they’re wrong. I have never seen anything like this in my political life. If people think ‘both sides do it’, then they’re wrong. There is nothing remotely like this coming out of the No camp or any political cause I’ve ever been involved in. Why would there be?

We’ve put the tour on hold for 72 hours, while we talk through safety issues with the police, train our staff on personal safety. We are rotating some of our staff out of the tour who are being targeted for abuse. I very much want to get back on the streets.

The first seventy meetings were a mix of passionate politics and occasional enjoyable street theatre. But recently the Yes campaign allowed the taps of a mob mentality to be turned on. It is time they turned them off.

I've been called a paedophile, a terrorist and a Quisling: Jim Murphy on the 'Yes' mob ¬Ľ Spectator Blogs(external - login to view)